There was a big deal made among our fanbase about how few plays we ran against Minnesota, 52. I was curious to know what bothered some of my fellow fans as to what bothered them so much about this number. Clearly the number is skewed a bit as Minnesota ran a 9+ minute drive early that ate up a ton of the clock. But still 52 is far less than the 75, 80, 90+ that some of the top programs in the country are able to run week in and week out. We did manage to snap 82 times against PSU, but that did include 4 OTs and a rather harried, crazy game as well.

I recall thinking at the beginning of this year while watching the first few games of the football season that Thursday night (including MSU) that I hadn’t really seen a team huddle that entire night. I was then a bit relieved to see our offense against CMU also participating in this no-huddle idea (I'm quite certain we no-hudddled or I guess it could have been considered just a quick huddle) . I think the relief was more of a macro “keeping up with the Joneses” idea than anything more specific or tangible. Now I know exactly the reasons why I think a no-huddle, faster paced strategy is not only optimal, but required to be successful in this day and age of college football.

Here are my various points/thoughts on why I believe this strategy is so effective, and conversely when not used why it is such a huge detriment.

1. Defensive substitutions – when you control the pace on offense you will control the pace of defensive substitutions/adjustments as well. This is even more important when playing us this year as our DLinemen seem to rotate in/out of a game nearly every play. The funny thing to me is that the very reason that we probably do this is to keep our guys fresh. But I would argue that having them play a down then immediately have to sprint off the field, or sprint onto the field then have to play a down actually tires them out more than if they just ran a play, stood there, then ran another play.

2. Another poster pointed out the differences between how Oregon runs a practice and Michigan. Our practices are slower paced with much more instruction. Theirs are fast paced with fast repetition. I would assume Oregon probably runs twice as many plays in any given practice as we do. This seems like an important advantage to me over the course of a season as the offense should become much more comfortable to a player with increased repetition, like with almost anything in life. I believe someone else pointed out that Washington has also picked up on this idea and I can only imagine those two teams are not alone.

The two items above are specific advantages to running a fast paced offense. But there is really another more important aspect to this. And to me the no-huddle aspect is far and away the most important.

I have always been annoyed when Peyton Manning comes to the line and spends 15 seconds barking out “Omaha” and other shit. Sometimes he’s actually changing the play just prior to the snap and other times it’s all just BS to get the defense to overthink and maybe change their call. But regardless of his intention he does this before almost every snap and uses up most of the play clock each time. What this does is gives him the last play call option against the defense every single time.

Similarly to how I feel watching Manning I get very frustrated watching NW line up quickly before every play then the entire offense looks over to the sideline. Their offensive coordinator is squeezing every drop of advantage out of each situation by calling the most optimal play based on down/distance/time/score and most importantly how the defense is set up. This is the poker equivalent of always playing from the button. This is a HUGE advantage.

Michigan and Borges however seems to have gotten away from the no-huddle idea that I was so relieved to see in the first game of the season against CMU (at least I believe we did some no huddle against CMU). When you break the huddle with the play clock quickly winding down it takes away every single advantage that teams like NW have created for themselves. Devin has zero time to make any real adjustments based on the defensive set, not to mention costly delays of game or burning costly timeouts to avoid them.

Here is a screen shot I saw posted somewhere of an OT play against PSU.

It was mentioned that this was a run to the short side of the field. So assuming that this was: a) not photoshopped, and b) a run to the short side of the field then, ARE YOU FUCKING KIDDING ME? What play do you think NW would run if they came to the line and saw this being offered by the defense? I’m sure they would have about 20 seconds to decide what to do and it sure as fugg wouldn’t be a run to the short side.

I really like Brady Hoke. Early on he showed some balls periodically by going for it on short 4th downs where most likely Carr would have punted. I also thought RR was a real bonehead regarding a lot of the things that he did both on and off the field. But I don’t know man, we seem to have regressed right back in the Carr/Debord years on the offenseive side of the ball. RichRod might have been a lot of things, but from an offensive pace and strategy standpoint I was very satisfied. I don’t want to go around calling for people’s heads, but Beilein made the decision after I believe his third year to make some major changes because he was not happy and look how that turned out for our bball program.

With every other item where we struggle with the game couldn’t we at least get to a no-huddle or quick huddle most of the game and give our offense some sort of advantage to make up for everything else? If this was done against CMU then why can’t Borges just turn it back on again so he can opt to have Devin throw the ball to one of the two WRs standing all by themselves when the defense lines up like they did above? That is just absurd to not even give yourself the option to do so in those circumstances.

I was listening to The Friday Big Show with Jim and Al on WTKA yesterday. Near the end of the show they were talking about Brady Hoke going up against San Diego State later this year. This led to a brief conversation about coaches going up against their former team.

Jim Stark mentioned that he thought one of the great ironies of coaching was when Central Michigan visited Michigan Stadium and former CMU head coach Herb Deromedi, who according to Stark "was the assistant coach at Michigan the last two years of his career," was on the sideline in his Michigan blue going up against his former team.

Not that it's the be-all and end-all, but Deromedi's Wikipedia page does not have Michigan on his coaching record. It lists that he was an assistant at CMU from '67 to '77 and HC from '78 -'93. It says that he was also the AD for CMU from '94 to '06. Michigan and CMU have only played three times in their history -- 1931, 2003, and 2006. He was still employed by CMU in 2003, so if this actually occurred, it would have had to have happened during the 2006 season, maybe after he retired as CMU's AD?

A quick check of the records on U-M's Bentley Historical Library website shows no record of Deromedi as a coach on either the 2006 or 2007 team. I suppose, however, that it's possible Deromedi served as a volunteer assistant on those teams -- maybe as a favor to Lloyd Carr and Mike DeBord, with whom I believe he was good friends. If that's the case, then maybe that's why he is not listed anywhere as an official U-M coach.

I don't know myself, so I'm wondering if anyone can confirm the plausibility of Mr. Stark's story, or if he is just, as former WTKA host Doug Karsch likes to say, full of poi.